Toshiba Unveils 2.5-Inch Hard Drive with 640GB Capacity

Toshiba is rolling out a family of 2.5-inch hard drives that offer consumers and smaller businesses all the storage capacity of 3.5-inch HDDs but with 80 percent less power consumption and heat dissipation. The drives are aimed at such systems as all-in-one desktops and Energy Star-compliant PCs, according to Toshiba officials.

Toshiba is going big with its smallest hard drives.
The company on Sept. 1 unveiled its MKxx65GSX 2.5-inch lineup of 2.5-inch
hard disk drives that provide as much as 640GB of capacity. The 5,400-rpm HDDs
are aimed at an array of computing models, including all-in-one desktops and
highly energy-efficient PCs, according to Toshiba officials.

The HDDs can be used by consumers or businesses that need capacity but want
to save on power consumption, according to Maciek Brzeski, vice president of
marketing at Toshiba's Storage Device Division.

"These new high-capacity 2.5-inch HDDs provide benefits for both
notebook and desktop applications," Brzeski said in a statement. "Not
only do they continue to close the performance gap between notebooks and
desktops, they also provide a perfect alternative to 3.5-inch HDDs in desktop
and POS [point of service] applications
requiring energy efficiency and reliability in a smaller footprint."
For a lot of the targeted computing models-including PCs that are compliant
with the federal Energy Star energy-efficiency standards, surveillance systems
and digital recorders-businesses and customers needed to use 3.5-inch hard
drives to get the storage capacity they needed.
Toshiba's MKxx65GSX hard drive series can reduce power consumption and heat
dissipation by up to 80 percent compared with 3.5-inch drives with equal
capacity, according to Toshiba officials.

The series' hard drive with the largest capacity-at 640GB-can hold up to
182,000 digital photos, 168,000 digital music files or 520 downloaded digital
movies of high-definition video, Toshiba said.
The new hard drives are scheduled to ship to PC manufacturers and
distributors in the fourth quarter.